


You'll Think of Me

by alcatraz



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:44:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2753288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcatraz/pseuds/alcatraz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Jack?” Shitty hears Bittle say, “What are you doing up here? Everyone’s wondering where you went.”</p>
<p>“Shhh, this is my favourite part, ” Jack says solemnly, as Keith Urban informs them both that they can take the cap but they’ll have to leave his sweater. </p>
<p>Shitty listens closer, but the only response from Bittle is confused silence. A steel guitar wails quietly in the background.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You'll Think of Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZJ_Timekeeper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZJ_Timekeeper/gifts).



> this is for ZJ who has a bomb-ass tumblr and excellent taste.

It’s a Saturday when Shitty opens the front door to the Haus and the handle comes off in his hand. As he wonders if he can get away with just leaving it for someone else to deal with, the door itself makes an ominous creaking sound. He just manages to leap out of the way before it falls straight out of the frame and lands on the porch steps with a bang.

“ _The hell was that?”_ yells Ransom from somewhere inside the house.

Holster pokes his head out from the empty doorframe. “Yeah bro, what’s going on out here?” he asks Shitty. He walks out to survey the damage, his eyes lighting up. “ _Rans, come out here!”_ he yells. “ _Shitty made us a ramp!”_ He tries to slide down it, the door wobbling dangerously against the uneven steps.

Shitty shakes his head. “This is not an intentional ramp,” he says. Holster’s face falls as he stares down at the door he’s still balancing on. “Sorry, bud,” Shitty says gently. He claps Holster on the shoulder and the door promptly snaps in two. 

“Shit,” Holster says from where he’s sprawled on the ground, tangled up in the door’s remnants. He looks up at Ransom who’s frowning down at him from the doorway. “ _Shit.”_

Shitty sighs. “Property law loopholes aren’t really going to help with this,” he says.

“Nope,” says Ransom.

“I’m going to have to start fixing shit, aren’t I?”

“Yep,” agrees Holster.

Shitty sighs again. Hopefully Bitty still has the Haus toolbox. He steps carefully around the wreckage of the door and into the house, past Ransom, who’s still levelling Holster with a disapproving look. As he makes his way up the stairs, he hears the inevitable argument begin.

“Bro,” says Ransom sadly, “what have we said about solo door surfing?”

“I know, I know!” says Holster. “Solo door surfing isn’t buddies.”

“Damn right it isn’t buddies,” says Ransom, a little louder. “What if you’d ended up hurting yourself? What if Coach Hall paired me with Nursey while you were out?”

“Sorry, I didn’t—" 

“Nursey! _Nursey!_ He’d drive me crazy!”

 Their voices fade as Shitty reaches Bitty’s room. “ _I’m not mad bro, I’m just disappointed!”_ The door’s open, so he knocks on the frame. “Yo, Bits,” he says.

“Yes, Shitty?” Bittle is sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed, laptop open on his bony knees. “What can I help you with?” he asks. He frowns. “And what on earth was that almighty racket downstairs, goodness—”

“Yeah, about that,” says Shitty. “Can I get the Haus tools off you? Think it’s time I sorted this shithole out some if I’m going to be defending its habitability to the Housing Committee every second week.”

“Of course you can have them!” Bittle exclaims. He leaves his laptop open on the duvet and kneels on the floor to root around under the bed. “I only needed it to put together a particular kind of collapsible pie tin I was trying—here.” He breaks off as he pulls the toolbox out. He gives the top a quick dust as he hands it over to Shitty.

Shitty gives him a bro nod of thanks. He starts to head out, but something catches his eye and he stops in the doorway. “Hey, Bits,” he says slowly, “When were you going to tell us you weren’t sure about going to Winter Screw?”

Bittle blinks up at him, eyes wide and dismayed. “How did y’all know about that?” he asks.

Shitty points silently at the open laptop, Bittle’s twitter feed prominently displayed.

“Oh,” says Bittle. “Well, I—I never said I wouldn’t think about going, okay,” He snaps the laptop shut, flustered, and clutches it to his chest. “And anyway, what do you need that tool box for?” he asks, changing the subject hurriedly. “Tell me you’re not trying to build another ceiling bong, we all remember how terribly that went the last time.”

Shitty decides to let him take the out. “Definitely not trying that one again,” he says with a rueful shake of the head. “Just thought I’d get round to fixing up the Haus a bit.”

 “Really?” Bittle asks, actually interested. “I thought y’all were used to dealing with the mess?” He gasps theatrically, as only a tiny boy from Georgia can. “We’re not getting kicked out are we?” he asks plaintively. “Where would the team _go_?”

 “Nah,” Shitty says, “But like, the minutiae of property law can only do so much if the building actually falls in on us.” Bittle honest-to-god starts wringing his hands, so Shitty hastily backtracks. “Not that the Haus would do that,” he adds hurriedly, “don’t worry Bittle, we’re safe as houses. _Hauses,_ heh.” He’s not even lying, is the thing – the Haus is structurally sound – its just that the floors are shit, the windows are worse and at least 90% of the doors have at least one hole kicked in each of them. His own has three.

 “ _Minutiae?”_ Bitty asks, “Wow, this really must be serious.”

 Shitty sighs again. This _day._

*****

He starts his mission that Sunday by buying a new front door with money from the Haus beer fund and replacing the old one altogether, hinges and all. It only takes him about an hour, so he moves on to the back door. The hinges there are uneven too and rusted with disuse. He finds this out the hard way when he barely touches the top one with his screwdriver and it crumbles away into nothing. The other hinge screeches, and Shitty gets a weird feeling of déjà vu when it quickly gives and the door falls out of the frame with a thud that reverberates throughout the whole house. Immediately he hears the thundering of feet racing down the stairs from the attic.

 “DOOR SURFING!” howls Holster as he barrels through the house.

 “DOOR SURFING!” Ransom yells at the top of his lungs, hot on Holster’s heels.

 Shitty presses himself back against the wall, wisely out of the way as they shoot through the open doorway in tandem and leap for the door together with a third joyous cry of “ _DOOR SURFING!”_   There’s a crashing sound as they land in a tangle of limbs and broken wood.

 Shitty just shakes his head at them. “I don’t know why you expected it to work any better this time,” he says.

 Holster extricates himself from under Ransom’s knees. “Nah bro,” he says earnestly, brushing wood splinters from his blonde hair, “practise makes perfect, right Rans?”

 Ransom lets his head thud backwards into the dirt. “Usually,” he groans. “But, like, maybe this is something we’re going to have to let go.”

 “Yeah,” agrees Shitty. “We’re kind of running out of doors.”

 He leaves them to it and walks into the kitchen, hoping for pie. Now that Bitty’s moved in, the possibility of surprise pie is about 300% higher than it has ever been before in his entire life. Instead, he gets Jack eating cereal at the counter and staring out at the carnage in the back yard through the kitchen window.

 Jack looks back over his shoulder at him. “What,” he says, conversationally. He looks back through the window just as Ransom manages to hit himself in the face with a piece of door, trip over his own feet and take Holster down with him. “What,” he says again.

 Shitty walks over to the fridge to continue his pie search. “Bro,” he says, “I know you have yet to understand social skills, but usually you have to _ask_ things for them to count as questions.”

 Jack runs a resigned hand through his hair. “I don’t think I want to know, though,” he says.

 “You really don’t,” Shitty replies, homing in on a tin-foiled plate tucked away in a corner of the top shelf of the fridge. He peeks under an edge of the wrapping, but it turns out to just be half a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s not what he’s looking for but he takes a bite anyway out of spite. It’s soggy. “Did you know Bittle isn’t planning on going to Screw?” he asks absentmindedly, contemplating a second bite of the profoundly disappointing grilled cheese.

 "What?” Jack asks.

 “Yeah, I know!” Shitty says. He decides to give the sandwich up as a lost cause, wrapping it back up and leaving it in the fridge where he found it. “We should find him a date,” he tells Jack over his shoulder, “He’ll be too polite to stand the guy up, so then he’ll have to come.”

“Oh, um, okay,” Jack says. “Uh, that sounds like a good idea.” He doesn’t look up from his cereal.

Shitty can’t blame him. Lucky Charms are genuinely delicious. Inspired, he moves over to the pantry to look for the cereal box. He grabs it out from where it’s wedged in between some canned peaches and one of their endless bottles of sriracha and eats a handful of cereal straight from the box, a) because there aren’t any clean bowls left in the kitchen for some reason and b) because he knows Jack hates it.

 He’s right. Jack’s eye twitches as Shitty goes in for another handful, but he resolutely says nothing about it.

 “Setting him up shouldn’t be too hard,” Shitty says, obnoxiously crunching his way through his mouthful of cereal. “Even Chowder’s got a date at this point.”

 “He’s really excited about that, isn’t he?” Jack asks, somewhat distracted by a whole mini marshmallow that’s fallen out of Shitty’s mouth and onto the floor.

 Shitty looks down and seriously considers going after it. What a waste of a mini marshmallow. “To be fair,” he says, as he thinks about whether or not eating floor marshmallows would manage to actually make Jack cry, “Chowder gets excited about everything.”

 “Yeah,” Jack says with a grin, “did he tell you about the time Joe Thornton signed his arm and he didn’t wash for like the whole of September?”

 “He tells me that story at least twice a month,” Shitty nods. “But he also cried last summer when the Sharks stripped Thornton of the captaincy, so I don’t know if that really counts as a normal example there, bud.”

 “Fair enough,” Jack says. “Maybe he’s just really weird about the Sharks.”

 Shitty shrugs, replacing the Lucky Charms box back in the pantry without closing the top back up and watching Jack try not to react to it. “Anyway, try and think about a possible date for Bitty,” he says, “He didn’t really like the last guy Rans wanted to set him up with.”

 Jack blinks. “You guys have set him up before?”

“…Yes?” tries Shitty. “Remember? That lacrosse guy with the—“

 “—The tiny ears, oh yeah,” Jack says. He frowns, confused. “Wait, Bittle was _dating_ that guy?”

 Shitty wiggles his head noncommittally. “Like, they went for coffee once I think, but he turned out not to like pumpkin spice lattes.”

 “Ah,” Jack says wisely. “Of course that was a deal breaker.”

 “We’ll figure something out,” Shitty says. Samwell is enormous and also pretty gay, so there are bound to be a bunch of guys who would be perfect for Bitty.

 Weirdly, Jack doesn’t seem all that reassured when he tells him this.

 

*****

 

“Hey! Hey, Shits, hold up!” Bittle catches Shitty by the back of his tank top on his way out of the Haus the next morning.

“Yeah, bud?” he asks. He smooths the shirt out a little—it’s his favourite one. The design on the front is a red, white and blue beer keg, captioned with “Time to get STAR-SPANGLED-HAMMERED” in jaunty sparkling letters. It’s a work of modern art, in his opinion.

 Bittle rubs a hand across the back of his neck. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he says sheepishly. “I just wanted to let you know that none of y’all have to worry about setting me up for the Screw, okay?” He looks up at Shitty seriously. “Don’t take too much trouble now, I’ll be fine,” he says, “really.”

 “No trouble at all, Bittle,” Shitty says cheerfully, “Happy to help!” He bounds down the porch steps one at a time, laptop bag slung over his shoulder. “I’m going to meet up with Ransom and Holster at the library and we’ll talk about it a bit there,” he calls on his way out of the yard. Bittle kind of gives him a half-hearted wave in reply from the porch steps before heading back in through the newly repaired door.

 Shitty decides to speed-walk to the library because it’s November after all, tank top or no. He is wearing actual pants in concession to the weather, but that’s about as far as he’s willing to go. The pants are, in fact, the first thing Holster comments on when he finally makes it across campus to the library.

 “Nice usage of adult clothing, man,” he says, offering a fist bump which Shitty accepts with pride. “Solid effort.”

“Lardo took me shopping,” Shitty says. “She told me I was an embarrassment to our friendship, but it was pretty fun.” He looks over the table to where Ransom is having a quiet freak out over flashcards, like he seems to have every other day of his life. “Hey, Rans,” he says, tapping a finger on the table top in front of his cards to snap him out of it. “How did you find a girl to go to Winter Screw with you?”

Ransom doesn’t look up, eyes fixed on his flashcards.

“Filamental temperature-sensitive proteins,” he says, apropos of nothing. He checks the back of the card he’s reading from and groans in despair. "Filamentous," he says sadly. "Filamentous,  _filamentous."_

Holster rolls his eyes. “He’s in study mode right now,” he says. “You won’t get anything out of him for the next—” he checks his watch “—hour and a half at least, sorry.”

“All good,” Shitty says. He refocuses on Holster. “Real talk, though—where did you and Rans find dates? I’m trying to set Bits up with someone not-terrible so that he’ll actually have a good time and shit, but I don’t know where to start looking.”

Holster frowns thoughtfully. “Yeah, that lacrosse guy really didn’t work out, did he?” he asks.

“Not at _all._ ”

Holster tries to flip a pen around his thumb but gets the balance wrong and flicks it over at Ransom by accident. It hits him in the ear but he barely even looks up.

“I hate this,” he tells them. “Fucking amines, I swear to god.”

“Right on, Rans,” Holster says, “Learn that shit.” He turns back to Shitty with a smile. “Um, it was pretty easy for us, I guess,” he says. “We were talking hockey with a couple of girls at the last Haus party and we just hit it off.”

“Really?” Shitty says incredulously, “That worked?”

“Yeah, man,” Holster says. “Rans and this girl, Jennifer I think, they argued about the value of Corsi over plus/minus as a stat for like a good half an hour.” He smiles fondly. “It was hands down the nerdiest flirting I have ever seen in my life,” he says with a shake of his head. “Adorable as _fuck._ ”

“Right,” Shitty says slowly. This could be much easier than he’d thought. “So if we just throw another party this weekend and invite everyone we know who’s interested in baking or hockey or Beyoncé…”

“Sounds like a solid plan,” agrees Holster.

Shitty nods. “Done,” he says. “Can you let the boys know to set it up?” He pauses as a thought occurs to him. “And can you and Rans give it a rest with the door surfing, just for a while? I don’t want to end up spending all our beer money on shit that isn’t beer.”

Holster shoots him the finger guns. “You got it, bromigo.”

Ransom looks up from his flashcards finally, somewhat disoriented. “What?” he asks, dazedly. “Did someone mention door surfing?”

“No they didn’t, buddy,” Holster says in a soothing voice. He reaches across the table and gives him a comforting pat on the head. “Go back to your flashcards.”

All the blood drains from Ransom’s face. “Holster,” he says, seriously, “If I fail bio will you still love me?”

“Of course I will, bro!” Holster reassures him. “Lineys forever!” He holds out both his hands and he and Ransom start one of their secret handshakes. Shitty can’t quite tell if they’re doing Handshake 6.2 or Handshake 4 (a), but in his defence they both look really similar.

When they start fist bumping in Morse code Shitty decides to leave them to it.

  

*****

 

Shitty decides that the party is a resounding success.

 He’s lying on the roof of the Haus, above Jack’s room because it has easy window/roof access, when he comes to this conclusion. He’s also stoned as hell and contemplating human existence, which is always his favourite state of being. Are the shingles on the roof too loose? Nah. He can fix them next summer if he needs to.

 The sounds of the party drift up around him, and it seems like mostly everyone’s having a good time. Except, Ransom’s girl couldn’t make it to this one because she had crew training in the morning and the last he’d heard of Holster’s date was when she was drunkenly sobbing on his shoulder about the Carlyle extension at about 10.30. Straight sobbing. Actual tears, it was heartbreaking to watch.

 Maple Leafs fans, man.

 He’s been watching the stars and thinking about his hands—ten is such an arbitrary number of fingers, bro, really—when he notices that the party is starting to wind down. It probably has been for a while, but Shitty hasn’t really been paying attention. Some sad Keith Urban song starts to play in Jack’s room.

 Shitty thinks about it.

 It’s entirely possible that the song’s been playing on loop for at least twenty minutes, knowing drunk Jack. His tendency to listen to terrible country music totally unironically while drunk is both a blessing and a curse, in that it’s annoying as fuck but also funny as hell.

 “Jack?” Shitty hears Bittle say, “What are you doing up here? Everyone’s wondering where you went.”

 “Shhh, this is my favourite part, ” Jack says solemnly, as Keith Urban informs them both that they can take the cap but they’ll have to leave his sweater.

 Shitty listens closer, but the only response from Bittle is confused silence. A steel guitar wails quietly in the background.

 “Hey Bittle,” Jack says. “Bittle. Bitty. Eric.”

 “…Yes, Jack?” Bittle asks, still confused. Well, Shitty thinks he sounds confused. He thinks he’d be pretty confused if he were in this situation, to be brutally honest.

 “Eric Bittle,” Jack says again, very slowly as if he’s trying to make sure his words are coming out of his mouth in the right order, “Why don’t you want to go to Winter Screw?”

 Bittle sighs. “Aw, hell Jack,” he says tiredly, “I don’t… _not_ want to go. It’s just—” Bittle breaks off and sighs heavily. He tries again. “It’s just, the person I want to go with doesn’t want to go with me.”

 “What, no!” says Jack. Shitty thinks he’s the one who sounds confused now. “Anyone would want you to go. Want to go with you.”

 “That’s a very nice thing for you to say,” Bittle says, “but really, I don’t mind.”

 “It’s true though!” Jack insists. “I mean, _I’d_ go with you.”

 There’s a silence. Shitty really wants to poke his head back down through the window to see what’s going on, but he thinks that might be creepy and kind of invasive. More invasive. He stays where he is.

 “Thanks, Jack,” Bittle says. His voice is too quiet—Shitty has to strain to hear him properly. “You don’t have to lie to me though, you already told me you’re going with that tennis girl. For the second year in a row,” he adds, significantly.

 “But I wasn’t lying, Bittle,” Jack says. He definitely sounds confused now. “I’d totally go with you to Screw!” Shitty wonders if any of them are really clear on what’s going on in this conversation because he certainly isn’t.

 “I’ll talk to you later,” Bittle says, quieter. He must be moving towards the door. “Sleep it off, okay?”

 There’s a pause. Shitty waits with bated breath, because this is what his life has come to.

 “Fuck," says Jack sadly.

 “ _I guess I’m feeling just a little tired of this,”_ Keith Urban informs the room at large.

 “Me too, bud,” Shitty tells the sky. “Me too.”

 

*****

 

Shitty had clearly been mistaken about the efficacy of his party. Not only are Bittle and Jack being weirdly polite to each other this morning, but Nursey and Dex apparently had yet another argument, something which is rapidly becoming par for the course. Lardo’s around for clean up the next morning, which basically means she’s supervising which plastic bags have beer cans in them and which ones have bottles. She’s sitting on the dining room table because all the chairs in the entire Haus are somehow in the back yard, except for the toxic green couch, and she’s been around long enough to know not to sit on that.

 “Yeah, man,” she tells Shitty as she watches him pick up the various pieces of party debris littering the room, “I think shit got real after you went off and did your roof thing last night.”

 “How?” he asks. “I thought everything was pretty much on the level?” He picks up the remnants of a cardboard beer box and shoves it into the recycling bag. Lardo’s really into all that environmental shit.

Lardo shakes her head sadly, her short hair flopping back over her collar. “That’s a hard no,” she says. “Your frogs really need to chill the fuck out—Dex went on this rant about lobster for like half an hour and then he called Nursey a dick and passed out on the puke couch.” She eyes the couch dubiously. “We thought he might catch rabies or something,” she says. “It was all very exciting.”

Shitty glares at the couch. The couch glares back. “Nursey!” he yells.

 “Yo, not so loud,” says Nursey’s voice from somewhere near the floor.

“Where are you, bud?” Lardo asks, kindly. “Are you under the table?”

There’s a groan coming from what Shitty had thought was pile of empty solo cups. An arm emerges, and then a face, blinking weakly into the harsh morning light. “Sup,” Nursey says.

“Nursey,” Shitty says, “were you being a dick?”

Nursey blinks again. In all fairness, he looks half dead and far too hungover for this conversation. “I don’t even like lobster,” he says plaintively.

Lardo pokes him in the shoulder with one of her tiny feet. He moans, curling into a smaller ball on the carpet. “Derek, buddy,” she says, “this was not about the lobster.”

“Yeah,” says Shitty, “You were kind of being a dick.” He manfully resists the urge to nail Nursey in the back of the head with the empty beer can he’s just picked up. Instead, he puts it in his garbage bag and shakes it helpfully in Nursey’s direction. “Frogs get to finish clean up today,” he says, “I have Haus shit to do. Make it so, Lardo,” he adds, on his way out the door.

 “You heard the man,” he hears her say, “up and at ‘em!” Nursey groans again, sounding like some pitiful mix between a kicked puppy and a hurt kitten. It’s very sad. Shitty leaves him to it.

 About halfway through the afternoon he has a blinding moment of clarity when he remembers the frankly hopeless conversation he’d overheard last night in Jack’s room, and he has to go for a long run so he doesn’t end up finding the two of them and banging their heads together.

 He does manage to get the downstairs bathroom sink fixed though, so the day isn’t a total loss.

  

*****

  

Shitty’s walking to the grocery store with Bittle—the murder grocery store of course, not the racist one, because they do have standards—when they walk by two girls kissing at a bus stop. Shitty doesn’t really pay much attention because he’s too busy trying to remember if they have any milk left or if they only have that gross protein-enriched shit that Jack drinks, but Bittle trips over his own feet.

“Easy there, tiger,” Shitty says, steadying him. “You all good?”

 “Yes,” Bittle says, “But wasn’t that the, uh, tennis—”

 “Oh, Camilla?” Shitty asks. “Captain of the women’s tennis team? Yeah, she sits in front of me in my gender class this semester.” Camilla looks up at him as they walk past and he gives her a little wave. She waves back.

 “But isn’t she…”

 Shitty waits, but it doesn’t seem like Bittle’s really going anywhere with that. “Isn’t she what?” he prompts him.

 “She just has, um, real nice hair,” Bitty says miserably. He waves his hand in some kind of swoopy pattern in the air in front of him. “There’s, uh, lots of it.”

 “True that,” Shitty says, distractedly. He stares at the back of her head for an hour three times a week, he knows for a fact that Camilla's hair is indeed very well maintained. He’s still kind of preoccupied about the milk though. Is it too late to text Jack and ask if there’s any left? “Should I ask Jack?” he asks Bittle absentmindedly.

 “No,” says Bittle determinedly, “I’ll talk to him about it when we get back home.”

 Personally, Shitty doesn’t think that will help at all since they’ll already be back from the store by then, but whatever. Bittle gets weird ideas in his head sometimes.

 

*****

  

Shitty’s in the bathroom he shares with Jack, trying to reattach the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet with some sculptor’s putty that Lardo swears by. He may have misunderstood slightly what the putty was supposed to be used for, because it’s not working very well. Or at all. He’s not too fussed though. He can pick up some superglue or jib-stop or whatever the hell else after class in a day or two, there’s no real rush.

“Hey Jack,” he hears Bittle say, from Jack’s room right outside, “Can I come talk to you for a second? Just real quick?”

“Yeah Bits, anytime,” Jack says hastily, “Come in, come in.”

Shitty puts down the mirror slowly. Oh god, he thinks, is he really destined to overhear every single time Jack tries to deal awkwardly with his feelings? He thanks his lucky stars that at least there isn’t any country music playing this time. That really would have added insult to injury.

 “There’s no easy way to say this, Jack,” Bittle says in a strained voice, “so I’m just going to put it out there, all right?”

 “All right,” Jack says slowly, “Bittle, what’s going on?”

 “Your girl’s cheating on you!” Bittle blurts out. He gasps. “Oh lord,” he mumbles, “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry I told you like that, I had a little speech planned and everything.”

 “What?” asks Jack, again. Shitty’s sensing a pattern here.

 “Sorry,” Bittle says, miserably. “I know you wouldn’t have wanted to find out like this.”

 “What do you mean, ‘my girl’?” Jack asks, puzzled. “I don’t have a girl.”

 Shitty sits down on the closed lid of the toilet and drops his face into his hands. He shakes his head in despair. This is worse than a soap opera.

 “Of course, I understand now,” Bitty says hopelessly, “Is that why you were listening to sad country music? Because Camilla's in love with someone else?”

There’s a pause. “Camilla?” Jack asks, “Who—what Camilla?”

 Shitty can practically hear the gears turning in his head, it’s ridiculous.

 “I understand, its okay,” Bittle says desperately, “her hair is _so nice_ —”

 “Wait,” Jack finally says in dawning realization, “You mean Camilla Collins?”

 “Tennis Camilla,” Bittle confirms.

 There’s a creaking sound, which Shitty presumes is probably Jack standing up from where he must have been sitting on the bed.

 “But I’m not in love with Camilla,” Jack says, “I—I’m in love with—”

 “Aren’t you taking her to the dance?” Bittle asks. “For the second year in the row?”

 “Well, yeah,” Jack says, bewildered, “We had fun last year, and her girlfriend Asah is out of town visiting family so I thought it might be nice if we went as friends…” His voice trails off.

 Shitty wishes he were literally anywhere but here.

 “Oh,” Bitty says. “ _Oh.”_

 “Wait, did you think—”

 “So when you said,” Bitty says breathlessly, cutting Jack off mid-sentence, “that you wouldn’t mind taking me to Winter Screw…”

 “Bitty,” Jack tells him in a low voice, “Eric. I would take you _anywhere_.”

 There’s silence.

 Shitty raises his head out of his hands cautiously. Have they left? He gets up and presses a cautious ear to the bathroom door. At first there’s nothing, but then he hears a soft wet sound which is probably Bittle and Jack getting it on, which, _gross._ He’s torn between being proud of Bitty for finally getting some and being abjectly horrified that he has to listen to it.

When he hears a moan (possibly Bittle, probably Jack), he seriously considers climbing out of the bathroom window and sliding down the mostly functional drainpipe. He hasn’t gotten around to repairing that part of the Haus just yet, but he thinks that the 60% chance of it snapping while he’s halfway down actually sounds like pretty good odds at this point.

 

*****

 

“Man, that took them long enough,” says Johnson. “Really they could have figured this all out five thousand words ago and saved us all a hell of a lot of time.”

 Shitty blinks. “What the hell, Johnson,” he hisses. “Aren’t you meant to be, like, searching for yourself on the Appalachian Trail right now?” He blinks again. “How did you even get in here?”

 “Oh yeah, continuity, of course,” says Johnson happily. “I think Bitty’s finally touching Jack’s butt though, so all’s well that ends well. Right, Shits?”

“Right,” says Shitty. “You’re totally right, bud. Out the window it is.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I did not plan for my ao3 debut to be titled after a ridiculous keith urban song, but here we are. really though, I would highly recommend listening to   
> [**this**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2NpTwVr968) while drunk and emotional, or at any other time in your life ever. you will not be disappointed.


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